Word: blazing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BLACK COMEDY is a slam-bang comedy-literally. The humor of Peter Shaffer's one-acter springs more from body English than feats of wit. It is based on a single conceit -agile actors in a blaze of lights behave and misbehave, bump and reel, as if in total darkness...
...investigators worked for ten weeks. With 1,500 technicians assisting them, they painstakingly traced possible sources of trouble along 20 miles of electrical wiring, re-enacted the blaze in a mock-up spacecraft, exhaustively analyzed the innards of the burned Apollo spacecraft. NASA also stripped down two intact production models. In one, inspectors discovered more than 2,000 "squawks," or lapses in quality control. Hundreds of the complaints were of the paint-fleck variety, but there were also such serious flaws as improperly fitted electrical connections and exposed conductors...
...investigators acknowledged that the precise cause of the fire "most likely will never be positively identified," they said it was "most probably" caused by a faulty conductor in an equipment bay under Grissom's couch. Apparently, current from the conductor "arced"-or spurted-to another object, and the blaze began. Almost immediately, it raged out of control in the cabin's 100% oxygen atmosphere, which was capable of turning any spark into a conflagration. Some 70 Ibs. of inflammable materials such as nylon netting and chemical coolant fed the flames...
...that faulty wiring probably caused the fire. Pressed for alternatives, he blurted: "It has been theorized that Grissom could have kicked the wire that would have been attached to the gas chronometer." That would have caused an abrasion in the insulation and made possible the arc that ignited the blaze. When New York Democrat William Fitts Ryan angrily disputed that suggestion, McCarthy retreated. "I only brought it up as a hypothesis," he said...
BLACK COMEDY is a slambang comedy-literally. The humor of Peter Shaffer's one-acter springs more from body English than feats of wit. It is based on a single conceit-agile actors in a blaze of lights behave and misbehave, bump and reel, as if in total darkness...